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I don't know OCaml very well, but I do know that without laziness, it does not support as much high-level/reusability[1]. Also, it lacks much of the mind-expan

by Peaker 14y ago

I don't know OCaml very well, but I do know that without laziness, it does not support as much high-level/reusability[1]. Also, it lacks much of the mind-expanding stuff in Haskell (The class hierarchy explained by the Typeclassopedia). AFAIK, GHC had surpassed OCaml's compilers' performance, concurrency support, etc. Compiler rewrite rules are also a very nice feature that other languages cannot immitate due to lack of purity. Many of the parallelism benefits are much a result of purity, which OCaml lacks. Also stuff like software-transactional-memory rely on purity for their guarantees, which OCaml cannot provide. Reasoning about code is also much easier with purity. 1. http://augustss.blogspot.co.il/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-evaluation-in.html http://augustss.blogspot.co.il/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-...

TylerE 14y ago
Your're showing your ignorance. OCaml has full support for laziness. It's just default strict with optional laziness via a keyword (http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Lazy.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Lazy.html), rather than the opposite. The only thing Caml lacks that haskell has is typeclasses, so doing non-integer math is ugly, and non-int/float math is REALLY ugly, like something out java or something, since there is _no_ operator overloading. I suspect the main barriers to Caml gaining wider acceptance had more to do with a cultural barrier - both the documentation and error messages in English were (and mostly continue to be) fairly poor. Caml actually did attain a measure of popularity for a while in the early 2000s - the winning ICFP content entry was in Ocaml for something like 4 years running at one point.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  Unfortunately, OCaml doesn't have enforced purity outside the IO monad. This removes one of the main benefits of Haskell, which is to force people who are terrible at functional programming to actually write code in a functional style.
- nightski 14y ago
  I actually think the main thing OCaml lacks is the separation of pure from non-pure code via the type system. I have really become addicted to the way this ends up affecting the architecture of the code, and the guarantees it provides when using code I did not write.
- Peaker 14y ago
  Optional laziness is not good enough -- read the blog post I linked to. You can't re-use and compose existing functions from the standard library if they all tend to be strict.
- applicative 14y ago
  You aren't speaking to the principal point in the post Peaker links, which is accepted by Harper in the notes "As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators", which is of course all any anyone cares about; with explicit recursion the user's IQ falls 50 points immediately. The whole discussion presupposes a mechanism for 'opting out' of default strictness or default laziness, which exists in many languages.

by Peaker 14y ago

TylerE 14y ago

Your're showing your ignorance. OCaml has full support for laziness. It's just default strict with optional laziness via a keyword (http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Lazy.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Lazy.html), rather than the opposite. The only thing Caml lacks that haskell has is typeclasses, so doing non-integer math is ugly, and non-int/float math is REALLY ugly, like something out java or something, since there is _no_ operator overloading. I suspect the main barriers to Caml gaining wider acceptance had more to do with a cultural barrier - both the documentation and error messages in English were (and mostly continue to be) fairly poor. Caml actually did attain a measure of popularity for a while in the early 2000s - the winning ICFP content entry was in Ocaml for something like 4 years running at one point.

Locke1689 14y ago
Unfortunately, OCaml doesn't have enforced purity outside the IO monad. This removes one of the main benefits of Haskell, which is to force people who are terrible at functional programming to actually write code in a functional style.
nightski 14y ago
I actually think the main thing OCaml lacks is the separation of pure from non-pure code via the type system. I have really become addicted to the way this ends up affecting the architecture of the code, and the guarantees it provides when using code I did not write.
Peaker 14y ago
Optional laziness is not good enough -- read the blog post I linked to. You can't re-use and compose existing functions from the standard library if they all tend to be strict.
applicative 14y ago
You aren't speaking to the principal point in the post Peaker links, which is accepted by Harper in the notes "As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators", which is of course all any anyone cares about; with explicit recursion the user's IQ falls 50 points immediately. The whole discussion presupposes a mechanism for 'opting out' of default strictness or default laziness, which exists in many languages.